Privacy

What happens to your photos.

Written in plain language, because a holiday album is about as personal as data gets. Last updated 15 September 2026.

What stays on your phone

Every photo you take in Afterglow is saved in the app's own private folder on your iPhone. Your trips, your names for them and your photos work without an account and without a network connection.

Photos you never share stay there and nowhere else. Deleting the app deletes them with it, so treat Afterglow as a camera roll, not as a backup.

What leaves your phone

Photos are uploaded only for trips you share with other people, and only from an installation you signed in on. An upload carries the photo itself plus the details needed to place it: which trip it belongs to, which day it was taken on, who took it, its size and a checksum used to verify the file arrived intact.

Uploaded photos land in private storage. There is no public link, no preview endpoint and no page that lists photos to the internet. The app asks for them over an authenticated connection, and the server checks on every request that you are still a member of that trip.

What we store about you

• Your email address and password, handled by our authentication provider, so you can sign in on more than one device.
• Your display name, and a small profile picture if you add one. Both are visible to the people on your trips.
• Your trips: name, destination, start and end date, time zone and who belongs to them.
• Per photo: the trip and day it belongs to, who took it, technical details such as size and checksum, and whether you chose to share it.

No advertising identifiers, no tracking across other apps or websites, no analytics profile of your behaviour.

Who can see your photos

Only the people on the trip, and only the photos you picked after the reveal. A photo you did not select is never sent to the group.

The reveal itself is decided by the server, 24 hours after the trip ends. Changing the clock on your phone does not open a shared album early.

As the maintainer of the service, the operator holds the technical keys to the storage, as anyone running a server does. Those are used to keep the service running and to act on a report, not to browse holidays.

How long it is kept

Shared photos are removed 90 days after the trip ends. That clean-up runs automatically, every hour, and uploading something later does not extend the term.

Account details stay until you ask for the account to be removed.

Your choices

• Sign out on a device: uploads from that device stop and the local session is erased. Photos already received are not withdrawn by signing out.
• Share nothing: skip the selection after the reveal and nothing goes to the group.
• Ask for removal: mail privacy@joinafterglow.app and your account and uploaded photos are deleted.

Under the GDPR you can also ask what is stored about you, have it corrected, or object to it being processed. During the test these requests are handled by hand, normally within a few working days — in-app deletion is still being built.

Services we rely on

Afterglow runs on infrastructure from third parties: Supabase for accounts and records, and Cloudflare for the application server and photo storage. They process this data on our behalf and under their own security terms. No other company receives your photos.

Children

Afterglow is not intended for children under 13.

Changes

If the app starts doing something different with your data, this page changes first, and the date at the top moves with it.

Contact

Afterglow is an independent project based in the Netherlands. Questions about privacy go to privacy@joinafterglow.app, anything else to info@joinafterglow.app.